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Facebook wisdom from 2014

Wise or foolish? Useful or pointless? Enduring or fleeting? You decide.

Here are some of my one-liner reflections from status updates on Facebook during 2014 (and a few from before then). I hope you might find a nugget or two to aid your own reflection and stepping forth in your personal or working life…Sometimes when we chain ourselves to some railings, we give ourselves the freedom to be chained

Paul Levy is 385,458 today if you take it all into account, 44 if you have religious faith in Richard Dorkins

Freedom isn’t what you can do. Freedom is what you choose to will by willing your choosing

It isn’t 2014 you should be worrying about. It’s 1979.

The notion of freedom is irritating to a lot of people, who fear the concept so much that they experience a discussion of it as an attack on what little freedom they actually possess

Paul Levy met another priest the other day.. Whoops, I mean, a scientist.

The year is 2035AD. A new crime finds it’s way onto the statute books with a maximum penalty of 20,000 Euros or three months imprisonment: To publicly claim to know something about another person

“Originality is what’s left over at the beginning”

I am not the thoughts, I am the thinking.

“The original palette now is a thing of fear for many people, whose own palette is made from the broken pictures of cliche and repetition. Originality in today’s creative realm can still be beauitful and awesome, but tends to be defined as the original re-combination of already existing pictures, rather than the creation of something out of raw, pure, primary colour”

The theatre world – the place where the parents feast on the flesh of their kids, all in the name of art

Freedom isn’t about choice; freedom is about choosing

I am gentleness; I am openness, I am kindness, I am soulfulness; I am softness; I am readiness; I am nowhere near Loch Ness

In an age where people are impatient for instant gratification, un-numbing isn’t an acceptable option, because un-numbing usually generates alarmingly uncomfortable pins and needles.

Feels the buzz of a square mile teeming with choice, and so little freedom – this is the City

He took a trip down memory lane and there he found the present, vibrant and fresh, and inspiring the future.

Steps back into his natural place somewhere between battling for good and waking up in a chocolated stupor in Juliette Binoche’s little shop window; how easily we can forget who we are, thank heavens for good friends and a willingness to not always take the mirror image too seriously

Beautiful wings, unfolding.

I staying true, staying free, full of the warm fire that once set Time in motion

“Play defies definition when it is truly emergent and spontaneous.”

Freedom isn’t about choice – it’s about inner mobility.

Paul Levy senses the magic of the moment that eludes the cynics’ narrow range

Paul Levy says rescue your online Christmas!

Paul Levy senses the presence of the living dead all around him, and has the mobile numbers and Twitter names of most of them

Travel well, Johanna “Jolie” – you lit up the world for 98 years

“Love is burned by intention, intrigued by hope”

Paul Levy chapter two seems to be a wisp of light, looking a bit like a feather– the first chapter is all verbs and adverbs, no nouns at all, yet somehow thrillingly engaging– chapter two seems to be a wisp of light, looking a bit like a feather– chapter three is written backwards– Chapter five had a narrative structure like a lemniscate– Chapter four! I almost forgot. Chapter 4 took my breath away. And then I realised – my breath was still there; but there rest of me had been taken away and, even breathless, I was fully alive

It spreads more effectively than swine flu, its effects are more pernicious than E-coli. It is the evil disease of our age: Networking

You really don’t need a sledgehammer to crack a nut but it’s one hell of a lot of angry fun

Sometimes radical change requires only a tiny, almost imperceptible shimmy to the rightIt’s far better to be truly bereft of words, authentically silent, than being full to overflowing with a false continuous wit built from the cliche of others and others’ others

The price of tea may be going up, but the value of conversation is priceless

Paul Levy loves it when real Highland butter shortbread melts and surrenders joyfully in your mouth, like possibility sitting willingly on the tongue of creativity

“Most people are in not-places; not jobs; not-relationships, not-friendships, not-thoughts, not-feelings. Sometimes a not-place is a good place, it’s a safe haven from somewhere horrible – a not-that place. Sometimes they are simply compromise places”

“Stupidity is an act of love”

We’re not just here, we’re Here. And the part of us that is There is also here.

Paul Levy recognises the inevitability of failing this test; there should be no test, but yet again, there is

If your heart says, call, then call. Command the eagle and the bull to silence! Let the lion leap.

“Now the rainbow turns to white and black; I’ll keep the colours safe”

Paul Levy is sitting in the gardens, amongst the things that matter, and do not fear

Paul Levy has realised a forty-year old recipe for rock cakes is as profound a thing as Stonehenge

Are you on the grid, in the swirl, or, more tragically, stuck in the bit of the grid that overlaps the swirl?

“Life is an island off the coast of my work” – if this is true for you, something is wrong

Paul Levy thought of getting a book of all his status messages published but then realised not even HE would buy it.

Paul Levy continues to trust the roots of a beautiful flower, yet to show itself above ground

It’s bad enough having to breathe in the polluted air; but you really don’t need to breathe in all the nonsense that’s pumped out of government and the media each day.

“We are the dreams that stuff is made of – and our little lives are ended with a waking up”

Paul Levy is watching the sun celebrating him waking up to another day

Paul Levy wonders if people who are genuinely happy and at peace don’t really need to keep asserting it on facebook

Paul Levy says: “In the great vista of life, the breathtaking window upon the world, in all its clarity and splendour – some people have opted to be net curtains”

Paul Levy says: the slow brew is often the finest taste; let it draw, pour it slowly, watch it swirl and, sometimes, just sometimes, really small sips, savour it, let it work its magic

Paul Levy saw a child, no more than 18 months old, in a pushchair, commanding her family, with shrewd, calculating eyes, a self-possessed “ok” here and there, and the gestures of a fully developed adult.

Paul Levy realises that, for some, thresholds are barriers, for others, bridges and open doors, and, for a few, places to set up camp for a lifetime

Paul Levy prefers Cadbury’s flakes to human ones

Paul Levy wonders where his seagull has gone. It used to perch on the roof opposite my studio window. Now there’s an enormous vulture, eyeing me…

Paul Levy agrees with William Wharton that humanity will wane, and that foxes will develop self-consciousness and rule the earth

Paul Levy says “Wisdom of the heart is much better than knowledge of the mind”

Paul Levy believes it is all down to a world-wide Failure of Imagination

Potential lies, latent, (we think, in the future but really in the now), awaiting emergence, unformed, yet in manifold possibilities. Imagination can be dreaming illusion; but it can also involve bringing into picture form, the un(or not yet-) imagined real.

Imagination has, seemingly paradoxically), a concurrent DUAL potential ability ; to imagine the fantastic, to dream the illusory AND ALSO to wrap the hidden (“occult”) real into pictures in time and space

Paul Levy is rather sad at how many people are evollusionary these days

Paul Levy is watching as eloquent concrete, which inspired clumsy ink, is now transformed into elegant, pixelated thought-forms

Paul Levy is considering warm and cold facts – and whether truth has a temperature